W e now know that Captain Ale- gría chose his death blindly, with- out having met the ruthless gaze of the future which greets those who do not live by the rules. He chose to fade away discreetly, without fuss, and never raised his voice again after having made his way across the front line toward his disbelieving enemy, holding his hands in the air, but not so high as to seem imploring, and shouting repeatedly, "I have surrendered." Madrid was bathed in tepid air, as transparent as perfume. The melan- choly quiet of the night was broken only by the muffled explosions of shells falling on the city in a cadence that was more liturgical than belligerent. I have surrendered. Captain Alegría had no doubt spent two or three nights re- hearsing this moment. In all likelihood, he purposefully chose not to say "I sur- render," because that announcement would have indicated a decision made on the spot, when in fact he had been surrendering little by little for months. He had surrendered before handing himself over to the enemy. Later, when the time came to talk about it, he would describe his act as a kind of victory in reverse. In January, 1938, he concluded a letter to his fiancée, Inés, as follows: "All wars cost human lives, of course, but this war has become a form of usury. We will have to choose between winning the war and conquering a cemetery." We now know that he had, unwittingly, rejected both options in advance. Given what we know about Carlos Alegría, it is safe to assume that all he heard as he crossed from one trench to the other was the din of his own panic. All the noises, the explosions, the cries around him were absorbed into the si- lence of the night. Madrid stood be- hind him like a stage set, the skyline of the darkened city reluctantly silhou- etted by the moon, rising jaggedly into the warm air. Madrid was holding its breath. So began the defeat of Captain Alegría. For three long years he had been observing his tattered enemies, his countrymen, as they resigned them- selves to the fact that another army- General Franco's, and his own-was > 9 annihilating that immobile city, its limits arbitrarily defined by trenches from which everyone had long since given up expecting an attack. T wo months before surrendering to the enemy, Alegría wrote to his professor of natural law in Salamanca, "Violence and pain, rage and weakness eventually blend into a religion of sur- vival, a ritual of hope, in which killer and killed, victim and executioner intone the same psalm; already we speak only the language of the sword or the language of the wound." He'd had three years of service in the Qyartermaster Corps, performing his duties with the maniacal rigor of a sur- veyor and the stubbornness of an only child, making sure that no ammunition was obtained without due permission and that no soldier was deprived of the rations he needed in order to go on fighting-three years of inspecting the defeat of the enemy, through the green- tinted binoculars issued by the quarter- master s store to official strategists, mili- tary observers, and morbid onlookers. The horrors that Alegría could not see for himselfhe heard about. From his parapet he watched the enemy come and go, from the office to the front, from the front to the work- shop, from army to family, from routine to death. At first these men seemed to him to lack the soul of an army, and thus to deserve to be conquered. But over time he came to the conclusion that they were, as he wrote in letters, a civil army, "which is to say, a creature as improbable as sub- terranean birds or angelic vermin." Fi- nally, watching those soldiers wage war as one might help a neighbor or a sick relative, he became convinced that they had been born for defeat; he began to see them as so many walking corpses. Captain Alegríà s own first brush with physical danger occurred on the day this story began. He had decided not to change sides but to surrender, to give himself up as a prisoner of war. The de- serter who joins the other army ceases to be its enemy; the prisoner of war is an enemy defeated, but an enemy still. When he was later accused of treason, Alegría insisted on this distinction. I have surrendered The typesetter armed with a rifle who took charge of this rebel army cap- tain, shifting a stake to let him through the barbed wire, probably had no idea that he was unleashing a new chaos that had only a tangential connection to the greater chaos of the war. No one fired. When Alegría came to the lip of a Re- publican trench, several frightened men in civilian clothes threatened him with their guns. He was ordered to jump down into the trench, and did so. In the darkness someone removed the pistol from his belt. He offered no resistance. The pistol was clean and shiny; the safety catch was on. It had never fired a shot. Had he disposed of it, Captain Alegría would have been in breach of the directives. He was surrendering, true, but with his kit intact. There was nothing fierce or military about his appearance. He looked like a law clerk disguised as a soldier: round glasses in the middle of a round, chubby face, which was perched on a body that would have seemed tiny if it weren't for his peaked cap. All the witness accounts that we have been able to gather men- tion a certain remoteness in his bearing, despite his compliance. He obeyed all orders as if he had anticipated the se- quence in which they would be given. First, he knelt with his hands behind his neck; then he lay face down with his hands behind his neck. After that, he had to walk, with his hands behind his neck, through a labyrinth of trenches from which ragged men peered at a dim horizon, and, finally, with his hands be- hind his neck, he came to a clearing in a wood, where a man in a greatcoat in- spected him from head to toe by the light of a carbide lamp. All the other or- ders had been whispered by his captors, but this unhinged officer bellowed at him, demanding to know what the hell he was doing there. Alegríà s reply, by contrast, was calm and quiet: "The Committee for the De- fense of Madrid is going to surrender to Franco tomorrow or the day after." "So that's why you're surrendering to us? Come off it." " Th t ' h " a s w y. This sent a ripple ofwhispers through the group of plain-clothed soldiers, but all that reached him were their curious looks and condescending smiles. They took him for a madman. Alegria would have liked to explain why he was abandoning the army that was going to win the war, why he was THE NEW YORKER, JULY 31, 2006 67